well, it wasn't so great in the early days either. a sense
of perspective here is useful - i just read this great book,
journey beyond selene, detailing the history of the jpl, and it's early days were littered with failed missions. it's inherently part of the game - small ships, packed with stuff, with hopes that
everything works.
but if you want the opposite effect, think about our voyager
probes - long lived past anyone's expectations.
yes, we can and should strive to do better, but you don't learn nearly as much from success, as failure.
Not to mention that you can put several PCI video cards in the same cheap PC. Multiply power by N.
not exactly true -- as people have pointed out, the pci bus is shared,
and graphics (even of the sort brook can do) are still bandwidth intensive, so this is a bottleneck which will
limit scalability.
second, and perhaps more importantly, almost nobody makes pci gfx anymore, and nvidia, ati, and everyone else is deprecating pci, and moving to pci-express post-haste.
assuming $52M/year, this is with a Mac-ONLY market presence (4% by common est, i'll round to 5%). you take that, and add the pc itunes, later this year, and now you make that $52M 20x larger. you're talking real money at this point. $1B/year might impact apple's bottom line. at their current revenue numbers, it's a 12% ish boost. keep in mind, too, that there's a lot of ipod revenue here too.
but, most of all, this is _incredible_ marketing for apple, so the fact that they're making money is just gravy.
which is pretty-darn-close to realtime. a friend of mine uses this almost as a live tool to tell him when to leave work for his cross-paris trip home. paris traffic being what it is, he still ends up parking a lot on the peripherique, but this helps a bit.:)
long before graffiti was a thing for the palm, there was a software-only version that i had for a newton. it worked great, when i didn't to quickly input some funky info ala addresses, phones, names, etc. it had it's own little floats-on-top window, etc. very nice.
i'll take that bet - come visit oakland county, mi anytime. one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, one of the crappiest road systems. both in overall design and in quality. almost like the world's largest test track for the big3 automotives located here. hm...
camcorders to rip off content, ok, nice, who cares.
but to jam mobile fones, that would be a good thing, and actually increase the value of the experience for consumers, not just for the movie houses.
for that matter, how about jamming screaming babies, and that person in front of me with the big head, and the person behind me who keeps kicking my seat.
rant off.
Re:I'm sure they've heard this before, but...
on
A Look at IRIX 6.5.17
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
However, since SGI announced that they wouldn't support IRIX anymore, everyone has concluded that they need to shift over to Linux machines.
false. sgi does and will continue to support irix,
virtually forever. period. ask them if you don't
believe me. or, even better, back up your claim
with a press release, web page on sgi's site, etc. you
will not find either, anywhere.
Canada, which has nearly twice the geographic area of the US and a tenth the population, I and many of my friends have had 2 MBit DSL for over 4 years now, and now I can get cable modems for 8 MBit for the same price. How much, you ask? US$25.66 per month.
move to strike, your honor, incomplete data!
so, it's well and good to compare prices, but only if you include other stuff. like, how much do you pay in tax subsidies to those institutions providing telco service? how much do your municipalities pay? is $25.66 the real cost? i don't know, but i suspect lots of other countries have different priorities than, say, invading iraq, and so can choose to spend their $ differently.
there's already lots of other shading stuff out there, nvidia's
hardly first. at least two other hardware shading languages exist. these languages allow c-like coding, and convert that into platform-specific stuffs. unfortunately, none of the things being marketed here, or now by nvidia, are really cross-platform. references:
hopefully, opengl2's shading will become standard, and mitigate the cross-platform differences. it's
seemingly a much better option than this new thing
by nvidia, but we'll have to wait and see what does well in the marketplace, and with developers.
since this is spinning, it's not going to be 464^3, but more like refresh_hz*x*y of screen. but, in either case, 100e6 is not so many voxels these days. a more 'reasonable' case might be in the neighborhood of an order of magnitude more - but still hardly enough to do very good aircraft separation, etc. i mean, sure, it's nice and everything, it's 3d, no glasses, etc. but it's not super high res, though 100 million sure sounds like a lot. plus i'll bet that whirring noise thing gets to you like a dentist drill after a while.
definition is everything. fortunately, we don't have to guess anymore, and explain 'real' to 'power-of-ten' bytes anymore. standards are here, have been for years, and are your friend:
definition is everything. fortunately, we don't have to guess anymore, and explain 'real' to 'power-of-ten' bytes anymore. standards are here, have been for years, and are your friend:
It is about having a -standardized- set of APIs that people can latch on to.
well, aren't all of microsoft's api's "standards" by that metric? anyway, none of this matters,
since you assume there is but OneTruePlatform. Yes, knock yourself out
on the platform you use, but if you ever go cross-platform, you're in a world of hurt. even if you use this.
there are many: SUN, SGI, HP, IBM, Mac, Linux, etc. who can't and don't care about MS standards - they use actual, community defined standards, like OpenGL.
will it help people port to other platforms? doubtful, as they're probably using other ms stuff if they're using DirectX.
will it help people use more advanced features on other platforms? no, since they're just using underlying opengl (and extensions) anyway, which they could do in the first place.
is it more performant? no way - it's another layer of indirection, so it's at least an additional pointer dereference, and extra stuff on the stack.
so i'm left thinking this is a solution in search of a problem. if you want portability, you write to opengl. if you want extensions, you use the _portable_ extension mechanism that opengl already provides. check out nvidia's directx vs opengl extension comparison some time - guess which one has better & more support? hint, it doesn't start with direct..
so, again, why would any sane developer write to this?
so apparently we all read arstechnica too.
this was on there long before it showed up
on slashdot. i don't blame the/. editors for
this, but i'd hope that the people posting
news would take a bit more ethical responsibility and report the source. see
the original arstechnica article for more details.
the issue with adoption of hydrogegn is the
entrenched position that fossil-fuels have. it's
not that hydrogen is harder to use, it's that there is billions invested in transport,
wells, autos, etc, all which would have to change.
not to mention the industry mogul's (and current
usa administration's) vested interest. in additon,
you don't need so many specialized resources to
create hydrogen, eh - just some electricity and water - think of the threat that poses to the oil hegemony...
there are always energy costs to creating portable forms of energy, but that's the issue, not that it's more energy-expensive to create hydrogen than to use it. add up the costs in
shipping oil around the planet. not cheap. the
real benefit is that oil is portable once
extracted.
security isn't an issue. for those people
expecting link-level security, dream on.
it doesnt exist with ipv4, and it doesn't
magically exist on 802.11b either. even if
it sucks, you're silly unless you're using
a higher-level security model (ala ssh).
security is alwaysyour
responsibility, not the hardware vendor,
or isp, or anyone else. your responsibility.
be empowered, take control of your destiny,
use ssh.:)
it's incredible to me that nvidia has produced
this competitve a product on their first go. if
you examine this review carefully, they place
within 10% on all the tests -- in fact, none of
the boards reviewed are that different from
each other (some surprise, they mostly use the
same base chipsets with different layout, etc.)
beyond that, this is nvidias _first_ mobo. i
can't wait to see what happens in a year from now.
though my bets are we'll see something which
looks a lot like an old sgi nt workstation
architecture. bandwidth is king.
sgi has been doing this for a long time. their
newest systems are almost this exactly, but instead of slow, thin pci, they use large, fast
interconnects:
Slashdot Mirror
well, it wasn't so great in the early days either. a sense of perspective here is useful - i just read this great book, journey beyond selene, detailing the history of the jpl, and it's early days were littered with failed missions. it's inherently part of the game - small ships, packed with stuff, with hopes that everything works.
but if you want the opposite effect, think about our voyager probes - long lived past anyone's expectations.
yes, we can and should strive to do better, but you don't learn nearly as much from success, as failure.
not exactly true -- as people have pointed out, the pci bus is shared, and graphics (even of the sort brook can do) are still bandwidth intensive, so this is a bottleneck which will limit scalability.
second, and perhaps more importantly, almost nobody makes pci gfx anymore, and nvidia, ati, and everyone else is deprecating pci, and moving to pci-express post-haste.
perhaps some of the metric/english impaired nasa engineers when to samsung?
don't believe me? check the specs.
ok, more fuzzy math:
assuming $52M/year, this is with a Mac-ONLY
market presence (4% by common est, i'll round to 5%).
you take that, and add the pc itunes, later this year,
and now you make that $52M 20x larger. you're talking
real money at this point. $1B/year might impact apple's
bottom line. at their current revenue numbers, it's a
12% ish boost. keep in mind, too, that there's a lot of
ipod revenue here too.
but, most of all, this is _incredible_ marketing for apple,
so the fact that they're making money is just gravy.
which is pretty-darn-close to realtime. a friend of mine :)
uses this almost as a live tool to tell him when to leave
work for his cross-paris trip home. paris traffic being
what it is, he still ends up parking a lot on the
peripherique, but this helps a bit.
ile-de-france traffic site
long before graffiti was a thing for the palm, there
was a software-only version that i had for a newton.
it worked great, when i didn't to quickly input some
funky info ala addresses, phones, names, etc. it had
it's own little floats-on-top window, etc. very nice.
i'll take that bet - come visit oakland county, mi anytime. one of the wealthiest counties in the nation, one of the
crappiest road systems. both in overall design and in
quality. almost like the world's largest test track for
the big3 automotives located here. hm...
camcorders to rip off content, ok, nice, who cares.
but to jam mobile fones, that would be a good thing,
and actually increase the value of the experience
for consumers, not just for the movie houses.
for that matter, how about jamming screaming babies,
and that person in front of me with the big head,
and the person behind me who keeps kicking my seat.
rant off.
false. sgi does and will continue to support irix, virtually forever. period. ask them if you don't believe me. or, even better, back up your claim with a press release, web page on sgi's site, etc. you will not find either, anywhere.
Canada, which has nearly twice the geographic area of the US and a tenth the population, I and many of my friends have had 2 MBit DSL for over 4 years now, and now I can get cable modems for 8 MBit for the same price. How much, you ask? US$25.66 per month.
move to strike, your honor, incomplete data!
so, it's well and good to compare prices, but only if
you include other stuff. like, how much do you pay
in tax subsidies to those institutions providing telco
service? how much do your municipalities pay?
is $25.66 the real cost? i don't know, but i
suspect lots of other countries have different priorities
than, say, invading iraq, and so can choose to spend
their $ differently.
but check it out, and let us know...
- opengl shader.
- a great paper on the hardware shading problem, and a very generic approach.
- stanford's rtsl.
- the proposed opengl2 also has a hardware shading abstraction language.
of course, the progenitor of all these, conceptually, is renderman's shading language.hopefully, opengl2's shading will become standard, and mitigate the cross-platform differences. it's seemingly a much better option than this new thing by nvidia, but we'll have to wait and see what does well in the marketplace, and with developers.
given the way this thing works, shouldn't the title be:
Science: 3D Visualization Moves In Circles
;P
since this is spinning, it's not going to be 464^3, but more like refresh_hz*x*y of screen. but, in either case, 100e6 is not so many voxels these days. a more 'reasonable' case might be in the neighborhood of an order of magnitude more - but still hardly enough to do very good aircraft separation, etc. i mean, sure, it's nice and everything, it's 3d, no glasses, etc. but it's not super high res, though 100 million sure sounds like a lot. plus i'll bet that whirring noise thing gets to you like a dentist drill after a while.
26^3 = 9 x 10^18 = 9 exabytes
check out the feature list.
National Institute of Standards
- one kibibit 1 Kibit = 210 bit = 1024 bit
- one kilobit 1 kbit = 103 bit = 1000 bit
- one mebibyte 1 MiB = 220 B = 1 048 576 B
- one megabyte 1 MB = 106 B = 1 000 000 B
- one gibibyte 1 GiB = 230 B = 1 073 741 824 B
- one gigabyte 1 GB = 109 B = 1 000 000 000 B
National Institute of Standardswell, aren't all of microsoft's api's "standards" by that metric? anyway, none of this matters, since you assume there is but OneTruePlatform. Yes, knock yourself out on the platform you use, but if you ever go cross-platform, you're in a world of hurt. even if you use this.
there are many: SUN, SGI, HP, IBM, Mac, Linux, etc. who can't and don't care about MS standards - they use actual, community defined standards, like OpenGL.
will it help people port to other platforms? doubtful, as they're probably using other ms stuff if they're using DirectX.
will it help people use more advanced features on other platforms? no, since they're just using underlying opengl (and extensions) anyway, which they could do in the first place.
is it more performant? no way - it's another layer of indirection, so it's at least an additional pointer dereference, and extra stuff on the stack.
so i'm left thinking this is a solution in search of a problem. if you want portability, you write to opengl. if you want extensions, you use the _portable_ extension mechanism that opengl already provides. check out nvidia's directx vs opengl extension comparison some time - guess which one has better & more support? hint, it doesn't start with direct..
so, again, why would any sane developer write to this?
(and yes, i read the faq.)
so apparently we all read arstechnica too. this was on there long before it showed up on slashdot. i don't blame the /. editors for
this, but i'd hope that the people posting
news would take a bit more ethical responsibility and report the source. see
the original arstechnica article for more details.
please, katz, dont quote facts without context. is the industry growing? is 4.5% this year going to be $9 billion, then 4.5% next year $10 billion?
at any rate, none of this silly punditry matters, as the people who use these systems find them elegant, stable, and most of all, useful.
security is always your responsibility, not the hardware vendor, or isp, or anyone else. your responsibility.
be empowered, take control of your destiny, use ssh. :)
they call them editors for a reason.
it's incredible to me that nvidia has produced
this competitve a product on their first go. if
you examine this review carefully, they place
within 10% on all the tests -- in fact, none of
the boards reviewed are that different from
each other (some surprise, they mostly use the
same base chipsets with different layout, etc.)
beyond that, this is nvidias _first_ mobo. i
can't wait to see what happens in a year from now.
though my bets are we'll see something which
looks a lot like an old sgi nt workstation
architecture. bandwidth is king.
sgi has been doing this for a long time. their
newest systems are almost this exactly, but instead of slow, thin pci, they use large, fast
interconnects:
http://www.sgi.com/origin/300/